“To force oneself to believe and to accept a thing without understanding is political, and not spiritual or intellectual.”
~Siddhārtha Gautama

"Reality is just a conspiracy theory when you are locked into delusions." --Stefan Molyneux
"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom."
~Dwight D Eisenhower
"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives... and I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it." ~John Lennon
"We are living in a Casino Gulag Economy. Revolt now or be a debt slave." ~Max Keiser
"You been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok."
~Malcome X
“You don’t die for revolution, you have to live for it.”
~Immoral Technique

Bitcoin-accepting Atlantis & Sheep take on the Silk Road

Bitcoin-accepting Atlantis and Sheep are poised to take on the Silk Road, which remains by far the biggest drug sales site.

When the online drug sales site Silk Road first appeared in 2011, the idea of anonymously buying any drug imaginable from the Internet seemed like cyberpunk fiction. Watch the cheery video ad for the latest dark-web drug marketplace today, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was selling a service as mainstream as online dating or car insurance.

That ad, posted to YouTube Wednesday by the black market drug sales site Atlantis, (Update: now removed for violating its terms of service) features the story of “Charlie,” a “stoner” who moves to a new city for work and can’t find any marijuana until he discovers Atlantis’s “virtual black market,” orders some pot, and gets “high as a damn kite.” It’s the latest sign of increasing competition between websites using encryption tools and the crypto-currency Bitcoin to enable a booming business in illegal drug sales, from marijuana to modafinil to methamphetamines.

Atlantis, which launched in March, is poised to take on the Silk Road, which remains by far the biggest drug sales site, with close to60,000 unique visitors a day by one researcher’s rough measure and $22 million annual sales according to a study last year. Both run on the anonymity service Tor to hide the location of their servers and the identities of any visitors to their sites, and both accept Bitcoin to avoid having their transactions tracked through bank records.

Atlantis has amassed more than two thousand product listings from third party sellers, more than 1,700 of which are illegal drugs including cocaine and heroin. That’s just a fraction of the more than ten thousand products listed on Silk Road, of which more than nine thousand are drugs.

In an “ask-me-anything” session on Reddit earlier this month, Atlantis’ chief executive boasted that it’s gaining users and sellers by taking lower commissions, having a more responsive site with less downtime, and offering simpler encryption tools, among other features. “The road has more users, but our service is better (to put it bluntly),” the Atlantis CEO wrote.

And Atlantis isn’t Silk Road’s only competitor. Another Tor-based drug site calling itself Black Market Reloaded launched shortly after the Silk Road in 2011 and reached close to $700,000 a month in transactions in April of this year, boasting of more than 20,000 new registrations a month at the time.

Black Market Reloaded’s pseudonymous administrator, who uses the name Backopy, has made a point of keeping an especially low profile compared to his competitors. “I don’t see myself as a big leader or a personality to be praised,” he wrote in one post on Black Market Reloaded’s forums. “I see my role here as the guy in the machine room, simply making the ship float and move forward, a lonely machine worker, that’s all.”

But neither has spoken to the public to the same degree as Atlantis, both in its video ad and when the site’s CEO answered Reddit users questions on a public forum earlier this month. When one Redditor asked whether that publicity would attract a crackdown from law enforcement, Atlantis’ CEO responded that “We want to bring attention to the site and bring our vendors more buyers. Law enforcement is going to be aware of us (and probably already is) regardless of the way we choose to put our product out there.” When another Redditor asked how the Atlantis admin was able to freely use Reddit without being arrested, the CEO responded merely with the words “anonymity technology” and a link to Tor’s website as well as the Wikipedia entry for virtual private networks.

But other Bitcoin services such as the direct peer-to-peer Bitcoin trade service “LocalCoin” and money-laundering sites still allow users to remove traces of their identity from the crypto-currency. The administrators behind sites like Atlantis, for their part, don’t seem particularly worried about the feds catching up with their digital drug trade. “We did a lot of planning in relation to this and haven’t had any security issues so far,” wrote the site’s CEO in his Reddit conversation. “We take many measures to protect our identity.”

One thought on “Bitcoin-accepting Atlantis & Sheep take on the Silk Road”

We have some terrible news. Regrettably it has come time for Atlantis to close its doors. Due to security reasons outside of our control we have no choice but to cease operation of the Atlantis Market marketplace. Believe us when we say we wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t 100% necessary.

Due to the urgency we are allowing all users to withdrawal all their coins for one week before the site, and forum, are shut down permanently. Please remove all of your coins, these will not be recoverable after one week from now. Anything remaining in your accounts will be donated to a drug related charity of our choosing.

We wish to thank all of you for making Atlantis a great and memorable place to trade on. We wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

Humans are not just livestock on someone else's farm, we are the only species on Earth that actually pays rent... The truth is our money is fake. Our debt is fake. Our two party system is fake. Our healthcare system is fake... Just look at it, most of the stuff we've been told is fake. Once you realize this, what you've thought of as reality begins to look like a cheap set on some ridiculous B movie.
The world is upside-down. Doctors destroy health and the news media doctors information. Cops on the take, lawyers take us to the cleaners. The Supreme Court mangles justice, Universities distort knowledge, bankers crush our wealth and phony up their own. Governments torture liberty, and twist freedom. Religious leaders garble truth and pervert spirituality while they promise pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die. Politicians lie, consumers buy. Corruption runs rampant and everyone just accepts it as the price of doing business. So we go on trusting experts and professionals to keep the whole mess going a little longer.
The whole system is a criminal syndicate... a self-organizing group of greedy individuals, companies or entities formed to promote a common interest, namely to control the useless eaters, extract their wealth, and profit form their slow death... We are living on their farm, they milk us and then they kill us.
In the Age of Pisces-Virgo people looked for a great leader or teacher or messiah to show them the way... but in the New Age of Aquarius-Leo we will unlearn such beliefs, stop submitting to false authority and reclaim our autonomy and individual sovereignty. This is what it means to unSpy!